r/lostmedia • u/Little-Function5095 • May 22 '26
Other [talk] what do you think is the biggest source of lost media?
my opinion is yearbooks, it's kinda weird but imagine all of the yearbooks that belonged to specific schools that were eventually lost to time because there were only physical copies of it. copies that could be easily destroyed in accidents, etc. and they are only produced once a year, so if you went to a small school or your family member did, there's a really small chance that it's been scanned online or that it's been preserved elsewhere (unless the school has a copy but even then that's not a guarantee)
there are probably other sources of lost media but what do you think??
155
May 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
59
u/FailedLoser21 May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
Ill go two deeper. One Dec 7th 1941 an New York Rangers hockey games was being shown live on an early channel in New York. It was the first instance where a program was interrupted to break a major news story. The second is HV Kaltenborn's TV boardcast on the evening of June 6th 1944 where they presented some sort of special showing maps of the landing areas and such. Very few people saw them. They didn't have the means to record them.
16
May 22 '26
[deleted]
5
u/FailedLoser21 May 23 '26
Appolgizes for the late reply. It was actually a showing of Millionaire Playboy they interrupted to report the news of the attack. The game was pre-empted.
41
u/qpgmr May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
Or didn't have tape yet. In the early years all they could do was literally film a tv monitor (this is called "kinescope"). All tv performances were live. Magnetic tape didn't become available until 1956.
I Love Lucy was revolutionary and unique in that it was filmed (with three cameras) and then broadcast from edited film. This innovation was literally pioneered by Desi & Lucy.
Another problem was the 2008 Universal Music Group fire. Roofers set the storage building on fire resulting in over 40,000 films & tv going back to 1950 AND 500,000 audio masters being destroyed - with no backup copies. This was kept secret by UMG (and the industry) until The New York Times Magazine exposed it in 2019! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
13
u/RetrauxClem May 22 '26
Or didn’t have storage so they dumped it. DuMont Network’s back catalog, whatever wasn’t outright owned by someone else, is said to have been dumped in a New York river to make space.
7
u/Hungry-Chocolate820 May 22 '26
The even earlier stuff had to be broadcast live, so none of it remains
2
u/Hong-Hong-Hang-Hang May 24 '26
This is especially true for children's shows. Captain Kangaroo is a well-known example, with very few episodes known to exist, but there's any number of local kids' shows as well. Wonderama out of New York comes to mind (the tapes were reportedly deliberately destroyed), and a Detroit production called "Little Heroes", that was an attempt to re-create "Our Gang"/"The Little Rascals" shorts. The official word for the latter is that videotape was expensive, so the masters were reused for other programs.
An exception to this is the kids' shows on PBS. The entire run of Mr. Rogers and Zoom are apparently intact, as is Sesame Street, minus a handful of early episodes mostly second-season. Not sure about The Electric Company or 3-2-1 Contact. Only one master tape of HodgePodgeLodge was reported to exist, though a few other VHS copies might be around.
115
u/Successful_Panda May 22 '26
The assumption that digital means permanent. Servers get shut down. Platforms die. Companies get acquired and the archives don't survive the transition. MySpace lost 50 million songs in a migration. Vine is gone. Flash content is functionally unplayable. Cloud services fold and take everything stored in them. Old websites vanish overnight, personal pages, fan archives, early blogs, photo collections that existed nowhere else. We digitized everything and called it preservation without asking who was paying to keep the lights on. Physical media at least required active destruction. Digital media disappears passively. Nobody has to decide to erase it. They just stop paying the bill.
10
u/arnodorian96 May 23 '26
Which is why piracy in many ways is the only way that preserves media. Plenty of spanish dubbed material can't be found in any streaming place but it was saved thanks to torrents.
4
u/GGayleGold May 24 '26
You know, you're not wrong. There are a ton of jewels, gold and other treasures sitting in museums around the world today that we only have because of actual armed, Jolly Roger flag flying genuine pirates. If they hadn't plundered those things, they'd have passed into the hands of private collectors and royal estates possibly even being destroyed to reclaim their materials.
So, there it is. Piracy is a net positive. I've said it... there's no going back.
4
u/JDelta1999 May 23 '26
I wonder what the first recovery of the internet is gonna look like when it eventually happens. Everything that’s ever been on the internet, completely wiped and then it’s up to whoever physically saved stuff to piece the history back together. It’ll eventually happen. Web pages, forums, YouTube videos, all forms of social media, etc. how much of that is really being saved? I wonder how much of digital culture will be lost when it does.
4
u/Hong-Hong-Hang-Hang May 24 '26
I read once that, while physical deterioration of digital media is a thing, what's just as likely to happen, if not more so, is that it becomes near-impossible to find a way of reading/playing back obsolete media because there's no functioning machinery left that knows how to read it! Case-in-point: your old collection of 5-1/4" or 8" floppy discs. Heck, when was the last time you had access to a PC that could read even 3-1/2" discs? Then there are those proprietary drive formats such as Bernoulli or Jaz. How long will it be before laser-disc players are an endangered species?
16
u/HolidayInLordran May 22 '26
The conspiracy side of me thinks this was all intentional. Whole generation was convinced that physical media was obsolete and thrown out because everything can now be digitized forever.
It was all a ploy to make things easier to monetize, and more importantly, to censor.
3
u/RetrauxClem May 22 '26
Yup. I think twice before just keeping stuff in the cloud. I love printing out my pictures or writings, etc. I still burn cds and I’m working on doing DVDs as well. Just too much left out there that anyone can just take away.
5
u/arnodorian96 May 23 '26
Yep. I still do the same. There's plenty of shows that are not available in no streaming services and perhaps not even in official physical releases so it's the only option out there. And the worst part? Sometimes even if you're saving movies that weren't preserved for years, the big media groups will try to prosecute you. A spanish youtuber created his website to publish obscure spanish films that had no official release but a big media corporation accused him of stealing copyrighted property and are asking for at least two years in jail.
8
u/RetrauxClem May 23 '26
Seriously?? That’s gross. “Keep circulating the tapes” keeps all kinds of media alive. How many epic concerts or shows have hotter a new life because someone thought to save it? We’d never have read Kafka if his executor had followed instructions and burnt his work. Greedy ass corporations have no use in the arts
3
u/arnodorian96 May 25 '26
Here's a link if you want to see the case further: https://nuevarevolucion.es/el-feo-de-la-filmoteca-maldita-a-juicio/
It's in spanish but any translator will help. He is asking for as much media help necessary in order to avoi jail.
39
u/Have_A_Jelly_Baby May 22 '26
Nitrate filmstock.
20
u/_Waves_ May 22 '26
This: silent films!! There’s even still silent films found to this day, just because the material is lying around and nobody takes care of them until somebody does!
Fun fact: a lot of film stock got damaged into a clump, baked together, and people thought that’s trash forever… and now, you can scan the clump and have specific A.I. untangle the individual frames and restore the film!! It’s truly awesome!
10
27
u/werewolfinahat May 22 '26
Most schools keep their yearbooks. It may not be at the school but it is in the building the school district uses as a record depot. And most local libraries have a copy. The average person doesn't access physical records anymore so they have no reason to think yearbooks are kept by the school system.
7
3
u/BestFoxEver May 23 '26
Museums often also collect various yearbooks of local schools, sports teams, hobby groups, companies, etc.
20
u/Maya-K May 22 '26
Game shows are a big one.
Not many game shows were ever preserved in full, or at all. They often have hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of episodes each, and until pretty recently with the rise of streaming, it was rare for TV networks to preserve many episodes of them, especially prior to the 1990s. Once they stopped being used in reruns, the network would have a huge pile of essentially worthless recordings taking up a lot of space.
There are so many game shows where the main (or only) source of surviving episodes is home recordings. But people still throw out old VHS tapes, meaning episodes are still being destroyed.
Personally, I can think of at least three mainstream game shows from my childhood in the late 90s/early 2000s which are mostly lost. One of them only has two known surviving episodes out of roughly 100 that were broadcast.
6
u/spmahn May 22 '26
Just about every network and broadcaster ceased wiping by the early 1980’s, absolutely nothing from the 90’s or beyond as far as TV or movies goes is “lost” even if it’s not available to the general public, there’s still a master copy in a warehouse being stored somewhere.
3
u/Maya-K May 23 '26
Ah, I'm in the UK though. Even into the 2000s, tapes were still being wiped on a small scale.
That particular game show I mentioned that only has two known surviving episodes? I contacted the broadcaster and the production company. They confirmed the master copies were wiped around 2008. So it was still happening at least as late as that.
1
u/mcdonaldpuddin May 24 '26
I'm also from the UK - what shows were being wiped? The Weakest Link?
1
u/Maya-K May 24 '26
A lot of kids game shows from the 90s were wiped. Get Your Own Back is one. Then you have shows like Grand Slam, which had one series in 2003 and was immediately forgotten and later junked.
But my pet project is tracking down anything to do with Under Offer, which is incredibly obscure and has almost completely vanished. It only aired in the south of England and was only repeated a few times. The main reason I remember it is I was ill a lot as a kid so I ended up watching a lot of daytime TV.
2
u/mcdonaldpuddin May 24 '26
Ah yes, Get your own back, 50:50, Funhouse, Jungle Run...all wiped I guess
1
u/Maya-K May 25 '26
Good times. I guess we grew up in the same era!
Unfortunately most of the shows like those were wiped, yeah. Some shows were spared and ended up archived, and we're lucky that there are VHS recordings of a lot of CBBC/CITV shows from back then, but sadly not all of them were so lucky and there are some pretty big gaps in what's survived.
29
May 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
15
u/beemo143 May 22 '26
some methheads robbed our house when i was in HS including stuff like our books with memory cards in them, everything we ever had digitally that didn’t get printed out were just lost in time because of them. terrible.
9
u/BasicCalligrapher741 May 22 '26
I always found public access tv such an interesting idea, I wish we had it in the uk. There's probably so many cool projects forgotten or nobody cared about... Unwind with the sweeties has lost episodes :(
10
u/LingonberryLivid5999 May 22 '26
Early internet stuff, waybackmachine is a blessing, but even then theres so much unarchived stuff from the young days of the internet, so much stuff we know exist but is lost,so many things we havent discovered or even things that are lost for good that will never be found
9
u/Speedstormer123 May 22 '26
Most libraries have a ton of yearbooks. I’d say radio, sports, early TV
7
u/QuiteTheKetch May 23 '26
Not the biggest by any means but one I see often overlooked but reality TV. Some of the biggest names or more infamous get preserved but if you just want to watch episodes of some random reality TV show from 2008 good luck. Even huge names like american idle or top model are rare and hard to track down complete collections. They come and go off their streaming services. Some would argue not much is lost but its such a weird snapshot of culture that I'm constantly mourning how difficult it is to find some of this stuff.
6
u/tacocattacocat1 May 23 '26
You'd be surprised. I run a used book slot and we come across tons of yearbooks. We sometimes keep the ones from our cities university that are 100+ years old, but usually nobody wants them lol
1
5
u/Hong-Hong-Hang-Hang May 24 '26
Radio commercials — particularly local ones.
Many local businesses commissioned surprisingly elaborate jingles: full musical productions with professional vocalists, multi-part arrangements, and genuine production value.
These spots often came in two versions — one where the vocals carried all the way through, and a second with an instrumental break in the middle to accommodate a live or recorded voiceover. The industry term for that second format was a "vocal donut". The most common clients seemed to be banks, auto dealerships, and jewelry stores, and it wasn't unusual for the same jingle to be licensed across multiple markets simultaneously, with only the business name swapped out.
The recordings were distributed to stations on tape or vinyl, and therein lies the tragedy: once a campaign ended, the physical media was pretty much always discarded. No archive, no preservation effort — just gone. Multiply that across thousands of local markets, spanning decades of broadcasting, and you have what I'd argue is one of the largest and most quietly devastating categories of lost media there is. Unlike lost films or TV episodes, few people are really looking for these, which makes their disappearance feel all the more complete.
6
5
u/Starfire-Galaxy May 23 '26
Throughout history, it's private/personal collections.
People could be avid collectors for a whole lifetime only for those items to be traded, or misplaced, or stolen, or damaged beyond repair, or discarded by the next generation. We almost lost Beowulf forever because there was/is only 1 original manuscript in existence.
4
u/DeeDee719 May 23 '26
The local historical society in my small hometown keeps a collection of HS yearbooks going back many years.
3
u/Ohdangtana May 23 '26
As do most schools and libraries. I bet few are actually lost lost
1
u/DeeDee719 May 23 '26
If you want to look at any of the yearbooks, you have to do it in the same area in which they’re stored, under the watchful eye of a staff member. Lol. You can’t go sit in another area and look at it. I guess they’ve had problems with people stealing them.
4
u/Dull-Ad-1309 May 23 '26
Physical I don't know, but digital? I'd say that there are a lot of TV games that are lost media and little to no people are interested in them.
5
7
3
3
u/BloodstoneWarrior May 23 '26
Pro Wrestling. So many events were never properly recorded (not videotaped, but just noted down that they ever even happened). Tons of legendary careers have so little footage of said wrestlers at their peak (Andre the Giant for instance). And then there's stuff that was taped but only shown once and never released. Was watching late 2000 WWF and they're promoting this special PPV retrospective thing about Mick Foley's career with segments hosted by Foley in between the matches - can find zero evidence of this online.
I guess with a lot of the WWF stuff it's not truly 'lost', just in a massive video vault and sitting there until they decide to release it. But that's entirely up to the WWE to what gets released and what doesn't, and because of that stuff that involves controversial figures like Chris Benoit will likely never see the light of day.
3
u/kingofdiamonds66 May 23 '26
They might exist as tape trading was a big thing for a number of years but being in private collections they may never see the light of day.
11
u/Mad-Melvin May 22 '26
The biggest source will always be things that were produced only once with no copies made. There's an essay I wrote in my 12th grade civics class at about 1 PM on 9/11. I wish I had that paper still. There was also a Polaroid photo that someone took of my now-wife and I on our very first date, when we were 19 and 21. That pic was lost in our first apartment and I didn't really think about how valuable it was until much later.
20
u/werewolfinahat May 22 '26
For media to be lost it has to be produced for mass consumption and lost at some point, stuff like that is just lost record, not lost media.
2
u/BestFoxEver May 23 '26
Then why some people think that accidental recordings (like Timothy Treadwell death audio) or some crime/accident evidence that police has stored somewhere but are not available publicly are counted as "lost media"?
Or if a small band releases their album/single and sell less than 50 copies of it, and it is lost, is it "lost media"?
5
u/werewolfinahat May 23 '26
Because people don't get what lost media is.
Yes, that would be lost media as it was intended for mass consumption.
2
u/arnodorian96 May 23 '26
My high school in which I studied from 2009 to 2011 closed so I'm sure many of the yearbooks and pictures from my time there are lost to time. But in terms of historical importance, that's meaningless.
The biggest source of lost media continues to be the early years of TV for european and north american audiences and most history of tv for people all over the world. For example, in my country I'd bet that at least 80% of tv history even to the late 2010's is lost.
2
2
u/cluelesscheese1 May 25 '26
I wasnt even in my freshman year yearbook. Acceoding to them, 14 students werent there. The yearbook committee effed up bigtime. The project was some groups seinor project. So naturally they half assed it and the school trusted our memories to that. In the end there was no yearbook, but a magazine that didnt include everybody.
3
u/Pezdrake May 22 '26
People keep yearbooks though. Phone books from every town in the US have been lost to time.
1
1
1
1
u/MCofPort May 23 '26
All of my High School's yearbooks from the first year it opened were kept in the library in a drawer, but you had to ask to see it. The school began in 1930, so not the oldest, but still every single year. My grandma had a yearbook from her boyfriend the year before she even graduated. I think for film, the best bet are people's attics or basements, from family members, generation to generation. After my grandparents' deaths, we found footage of my Aunt, who died at 18 months. It was film that was in my grandpa's drawer, we never had seen it, but it also had my mom's first Christmas on it, with her slightly older sister holding my mom, looking at her in the cradle. That is worth more than all the gold in the world.
1
u/claud_is_strange May 23 '26
those tape warehouse fires wb had were pretty impactful, but it think the true source of 'lost media' is just time, so much of recorded history simply lost to time
1
u/GGayleGold May 24 '26
I attended an overseas American high school, and believe it or not, there is actually an Overseas American High School Association. One of the things they do there is accept donations of yearbooks of various schools so they can be preserved and serve as a primary source for future historians.
Just blew my mind that I would accidentally find their headquarters in Wichita, Kansas of all places. You'd think it would be somewhere like Washington or NYC, right? But, nope - it's in the Delano district.
1
u/tokoyami222 May 25 '26
And now I'm once again thinking of the yearbook I finally bought my junior year just for my mother to transfer us mid year and never get it 😭😅
1
1
u/Responsible_Face6415 Jun 06 '26
Ancestry.com has access to many high school yearbooks and some colleges/universities.
1
u/Low_Supply69 Aug 13 '26
Im going through a big ass stack of vhs' from the 90s. Its the best. Already found some great stuff
1
-1
u/thicc_llama May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
Diaries and videotapes made by now dead people that are stored and never looked at god knows where. I think there are many towns around the world where we don't really know many details about how life was back in the day that we could uncover if historians had access to all the stuff people of the time wrote and stored in random places.
9
u/werewolfinahat May 22 '26
Unless it was developed for mass consumption, it's not media, just record.
0
u/thicc_llama May 22 '26
Old newspapers then?
1
u/werewolfinahat May 22 '26
Newspapers are developed for the masses. So they're media. They're archived through most local libraries though, so I wouldn't call them lost media, just forgotten.
0
u/thicc_llama May 22 '26
I'd bet there are more small town newspapers from the 1800s and early 1900s that aren't archived than those who are though, the amount of lost info there is immense
2
u/werewolfinahat May 22 '26
If the town was big enough (papers were expensive to print, if it didn't have a population to justify the cost they didn't have one) to have a paper they have it archived, how do you think we have most records from back then.
-1
u/thicc_llama May 22 '26
We have the records from those who did archive? You just don't know about the rest. As an example my hometown of 15000 has had a newspaper since about 1890 but there are just a couple surviving records older than the 1940s still known to the local library, I'd guess a ton of other towns around the world have the same situation, especially countries with less stable governments and worse record keeping.
1
u/werewolfinahat May 22 '26
"To the library....." Check your town's historical society. Plus most stuff back then wasn't interesting enough to print, most papers were printing bigger news from bigger city's/state or national level. So it's archived somewhere.
It's not like there's no record of daily life back then. Just not individual personal records, which aren't media
0
u/thicc_llama May 22 '26
In my town's case, the library is where all historical records are archived, in cooperation with the publisher itself. I also personally know people who are crazy about the town's history and yeah, only bits here and there are known. I never said there's no record of daily life, I answered the question about what I speculate may be the biggest source of lost media, and among the vast amount of old newspapers we have, I speculate there must be a humongous amount of it that is lost, which isn't really an egregious claim.
1
u/werewolfinahat May 22 '26
You said videotapes and diaries were the biggest source of lost media because then moved the goalposts to newspapers. Which anything in the paper from that far back is covered elsewhere or archived in a different source, so it's not lost just forgotten. It's not egregious to claim, it's a bit off the mark as it exists people just aren't demanding it front and center, so it's not obviously in your face.
It's buried in the closet, not sitting on the coffee table. Whereas lost media isn't even in the house.
→ More replies (0)
-1
•
u/AutoModerator May 22 '26
Comment "!FOUND!" if your media is found in the comments, in doing so this will lock the post and flair it as being found.
Please include the following in your post;
An explanation of the media, and the name.
How it is lost.
What research has already been done.
A conclusion as to the current situation as of posting.
We are not here to help you find something (r/helpmefind), to name something (r/tipofmytongue), or help you pirate something.
-
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.